Gears of War: The Rise of Raam by Kurtis J. Wiebe My rating: 3 of 5 stars This comic compilation was fine.  In the game, I don't recall really getting a ton of the backstory for the locusts given that the entirety of the story gets told from the human perspective. As such, I found it a little hard to care a ton about the story in this collection.  Interesting,

Gears of War Omnibus, Vol. 2 by Karen Traviss My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoyed both volumes of the Gears of War omnibuses.  The first omnibus bridges the gap between Gears of War 1 and 2, followingMarcus Fenix and Delta Squad in the battle against the Locusts! Find out what happened after the Lightmass Bombing and how the Locusts will react to this devastating

Woohoo!!! It took a while...but I finally got all of the Mirror Incursion Research DOFF (duty officer) missions completed with a critical rating! As a result, I got the nice little title of "Mirror Infiltrator" in Star Trek Online (and around 50,000 dilithium, which I don't have much use for at the moment).  This DOFF accolade had 10 missions to complete, and when I originally tried to play through

 Well, to be fair, I was never gone, but my "daily driver" for the past 3 years (during the early days of COVID) has been an aging Dell Optiplex 9010, which was a hand-me-down. When my work-issued Surface Pro 3 died an untimely death in 2017 (and wasn't replaced), I refurbished the Optiplex which I had saved in our equipment closet for just such an emergency occasion. The original use case was

Hellsing, Vol. 10 by Kohta Hirano My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well... this was an anticlimactic ending. 🙄. I was first introduced to Hellsing in Anime form in 2001.  The original ending of having "Incognito" as the big bad made little sense, but then I read somewhere on the web that the manga was not complete at that point, so the animators needed to modify the

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff My rating: 5 of 5 stars I would say that this is a "must-read" book. It reminded me a lot of the original aspirations and "promise" of connected technologies and "smart" devices, which was to serve people for the purpose of improving our lives.  Instead, what

 With the summer winding down, I guess it's time to leave the summer vacation magical island of Risa. Interestingly enough I did not spend a ton of time in STO this summer. I did log in once a day for a quick "Fly High"mission to get this summer's freebie ship, but there wasn't much to keep me around.  I don't think I participated in any other Lohlnut gathering activities.  I had stacked

Assassin's Creed: Brahman by Brenden Fletcher My rating: 5 of 5 stars I think this is my favorite comic story to date. While you do have the who assassin/templar thing going on, the protagonist is just a regular Joe Schmoe working for Abstergo.  His significant other is of an Assassin heritage (something she doesn't know) and ultimately becomes a victim of a

Assassin's Creed: Volume 3 Homecoming by Anthony Del Col My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was an OK story. Reading it made me wonder if they had more in mind as a continuation to this, or if it just fizzled.  It wasn't bad, but it was also not super exciting. Publisher's summary:The Brotherhood of the Assassins is in trouble. Resources depleted by their long

Assassin's Creed: Assassins Vol.2: Setting Sun by Anthony Del Col My rating: 5 of 5 stars Fun continuation to the first volume.  The animus components of the story take place in the Incan Empire during the Spanish invasion. This is not addressed in the comic book or the lore, but I'd love to get more background as to how the Assassin Order's numbers dwindled